Empire State Building retrofit project could cut energy costs by $4.4 million per year

New
York City has put some greener
updates in its tallest skyscraper, the Empire State
Building, in the form of refurbished windows that will reduce solar
heat gain and decrease the building's energy costs.

These
updated windows were installed as part of the Empire
State Building retrofit project, which is funded by the Clinton
Climate Initiative, the Rocky Mountain Institute, Jones Lang LaSalle
and Johnson Controls. The entire project costs $20 million, and
aims to cut
CO2 emissions by 105,000 metric tons over the next 15 years.
It is also expected to decrease energy consumption by 38 percent, and
reduce energy costs by $4.4 million per year.

The
project has recently completed the refurbishing of the windows, which
will decrease the building's energy costs by $400,000 per year alone.
These 6,514 triple-glazed insulated windows panels, which contained
96 percent of the original glass and frames, will also cut solar
heat gain by more than 50 percent.

But
this project doesn't stop at making the windows more thermally
efficient. In addition, the plan is to add
insulation to radiators to avoid heat loss, introduce
improved lighting, replace air handling units with variable frequency
drive fans, improve controllability and efficiency by reusing chiller
shells and "replacing the guts," upgrade building control
system to improve HVAC operation, upgrade ventilation control system
and introduce web-based power systems available to each individual
tenant for better management of power usage.

With
these updates, the Empire State Building could
become LEED (Leadership
in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certified, which means it
meets green criteria according to the U.S. Green
Building Council.

The
project is expected to be completed by 2013, and upon completion,
will become a model for other greener updates throughout New York
City as well as other major cities.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

First of all, we don't pay for the electricity directly. As a company. This is because we lease a building from an adjacent company and the power is 'on the house' so to speak.

My point is not that people are idiots (which my co-workers are not) but that people don't think very much about these things and it is only when you show them an Al Gore apocolypse movie that they start to think. And unfortunately they usually want to legislate their thoughts. And that IS idiotic, but unfortunately it is the norm now and I guess I can't blame them.

So anyway I try to do my part to get people to think about these things in a rational way.